Ethernet

Dedicated, Low-Latency, Ultra-Fast

Fibre Ethernet, also known as ‘National Ethernet’, ‘Ethernet Extension’ or ‘Ethernet Leased Line’ provide ultra-highspeed, carrier-grade Ethernet connectivity to businesses across the UK. Service is delivered using a dedicated fibre optic ‘bearer’ circuit with speeds of 100Mb/s, 1Gb/s and even 10Gb/s. Fibre Ethernet is perfect for LAN extension and other high-speed, high-availability applications.

Fluency’s Ethernet proposition is genuinely unique in the marketplace thanks to its LLU presence in Scotland, its UK-wide national Next Generation Network and numerous 3rd party carriers. Fluency operate points of presence (PoPs) across the length and breadth of the country. This national footprint allows Fluency to terminate customer access tails at the closest location, keeping the circuit as close to ‘last mile’ as possible. Read more about our network here.

National Ethernet Topology

Metro Ethernet Topology

Metro Pure Fibre Topology

Pros

Full National Coverage

Fluency have multiple interconnects to limit the use of 3rd party networks

Cons

3rd Party Operators are huge & unwieldy

Latency doesn’t always meet our high standards

Often two levels of supply chain before fibre operator

National networks often built to carry domestic traffic

NTE’s owned / managed by fibre operator

Restricted to bandwidth options set by 3rd party networks

Pros

Direct point-to-point fibre

Guaranteed latency

Single supplier upstream

Cons

3rd Party Operators are huge and unwieldy

NTE's owned and managed by fibre operator

Restricted to bearer ‘size’ options set by fibre operator

Pros

As above

Removes one NTE (and possible point of failure) from topology

Remaining NTE managed by Fluency

CityFibre (fibre operator) are small and agile like us

Bandwidth set by Fluency, and capable of 10Gb/s or more

Local And National Ethernet Reach

Using Fluency’s extensive LLU presence in exchanges within Scottish cities, Fibre Ethernet is typically delivered using only last-mile fibre tails from Openreach. This connects your site directly to the Fluency network with no other network operator in the path. Thanks to the optical nature of the circuit, service will be ultra low latency (less than 0.5ms to the Fluency network) and has a truly carrier-grade 5-hour-fix SLA.

In cases where the customer site is further away, Fluency can deliver Fibre Ethernet across the UK using a wide range of National network operators. These ‘off-net’ circuits are delivered using the 3rd party’s layer2 network, and connected to the Fluency network using its unprecedented number of NNI (Network to Network Interconnects) with its off-net carriers. Fluency has multiple interconnects with each of it’s carrier partners, including Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Vodafone (C&W/Thus) and others. Uniquely, Fluency interconnect with a number of other operators who have footprint in key areas and markets (such as Virtual1 for London LLU Ethernet and Allegro Networks for London and Manchester datacentre cross-connects).

True Resiliency

Where other providers may offer what they call ‘resiliency’, we often find that their capabilities are somewhat limited or the solution has not been designed with much scrutiny to the underlying operators. Thanks to Fluency’s choice of carriers, its truly resilient core network and local access networks, it is able to offer the ultimate assurance in resiliency and diversity.

Depending on location, Commsworld can design resilient connectivity to customers sites ranging from basic network-level carrier diversity and access-level carrier diversity to full cable-route design and national network overlap analysis (i.e. identifying any common routes and upstream providers that separate network operators may share at a national level).

High Speed, Low Latency, Carrier-Grade SLA

As with the nature of fibre optic services, speed is guaranteed, bandwidth is symmetric and the connection is inherently very low-latency. This makes Fibre-based Ethernet perfect for customers needing to take advantage of time-sensitive and bandwidth-hungry applications. For customers looking to serve or use mission-critical applications, the time-to-fix SLA is usually 5 hours, allowing you to take comfort that your network will always be on-line.

Where many service providers offer Fibre-based Ethernet solely as a leased-line replacement, providing just Internet access, Fluency allows its customers to fully exploit the Ethernet capabilities of the service. For example, additional VLANs can be provided to separate access for Voice, Internet, VPN or colocation breakout. Fluency can even provide fully managed multi-site Wide Area Networks using Fibre Ethernet and other access products. In addition to basic service separation, each of the VLANs can be treated with different Layer2 class-of-service (CoS) tags, allowing customers to push as much traffic as they like without impacting quality of service for crucial applications.